Volume 27
CS ISSN #0847-1266
2016-2017
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Δ ι δα σ κα λι α
DIDASKALIA
THE JOURNAL OF PROVIDENCE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
ii | Didaskalia
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Δι δασκαλι α
DIDASKALIA
THE JOURNAL OF PROVIDENCE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
Published by the faculty of
Providence
Otterburne, Manitoba, Canada
R0A 1G0
EDITORIAL TEAM
Editor
Patrick Franklin, PhD.
Managerial Editor
Russell Doerksen, MDiv.
Associate Editor
Shannon Doerksen, MA. (Cand.)
DIDASKALIA — 1. act., the act of teaching, instruction; Romans
12:7. Of Timothy, 1 Tim 4:13, 16. 2. pass., of that which is taught,
teaching; Eph. 4:14. Freq. of the teachings of eccl. Christianity: 2
Tim. 4:3 — From Bauer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the NT.
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching
(Διδασκαλια)...”
— 2 Timothy 3:16 (NIV)
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About the Journal
Didaskalia is Providence’s peer-reviewed academic journal, published annually by ProvPress, a division of Providence Theological
Seminary. Guided by the principle of interdisciplinary theological reflection for the church, Didaskalia features articles and book reviews
of significance for an ecclesial and academic audience.
Didaskalia is indexed in the ATLA Religion Database,® included in
ATLASerials® (ATLAS®), and abstracted in Religious and Theological
Abstracts. Didaskalia has been in publication since 1990. Back issues
are available for $5.00 (CDN) plus shipping upon request. Didaskalia
is available for free to all current students of Providence Theological
Seminary.
Didaskalia is published annually by ProvPress. Copyright ©2016 by
ProvPress. [email protected]
Submission Instructions
Didaskalia is open to all submissions of original research, articles,
and academic book reviews. Articles should run approximately 8000
words in length, be written according to style guidelines set forth in
Turabian / Chicago Manual of Style, and use footnotes rather than
endnotes. Book reviews should be approximately 1000-1200 words
in length and should include both summary of and critical engagement with the book being reviewed.
Please address all inquiries and submissions via email to:
Dr. Patrick Franklin, Editor
Associate Professor of Theology & Ethics
Providence Theological Seminary
Email: [email protected]
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Table of Contents
Editorial
Patrick S. Franklin, Editor .................................................................................. vii
Christian Humanism: Christ-Centred
Education by Another Name
Jens Zimmerman ................................................................................................... 1
Paideia tou Kyriou: From Origen to Medieval Exegesis
Nadia Delicata...................................................................................................... 31
Christ-Centred University
Education: A President’s Perspective
David Johnson ..................................................................................................... 65
A Theology of Confessional Teaching
David Guretzki..................................................................................................... 75
“Unity-in-Distinction”: Toward a Model for
Understanding the Relationship Between
Faith Practice and Academic Practice
Amanda MacInnis-Hackney .............................................................................. 99
The Veneration of Truth:
How Analytic Theorizing Can Make Us Wise
Stephen Kenyon and Mark S. McLeod-Harrison .......................................... 115
Natural Science and Supernatural Authority:
Scriptural Infallibility and Evolutionary Theory
8
in the Writing of Benjamin B. Warfield (1951-1921)
Brent Rempel...................................................................................................... 141
Finding Confident Faith in Science
S. Joshua Swamidass.......................................................................................... 165
Guests and Hosts in Academia:
Creating Hospitable Learnings Spaces
Elfrieda Lepp-Kaethler ..................................................................................... 189
Talking Straight in Education: Letting our Yes Mean Yes
Ken Badley and Kris Molitor ........................................................................... 211
Book Review:
Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God
by Wayne D. Rossiter ........................................................................................ 229
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Teaching and
Scholarship “in” Christ
Patrick S. Franklin, Editor
Jesus Christ is the perfect image of God the Father. All things
were created in him, for him, and through him; and in Christ all
things hold together. These affirmations from Colossians 1:15-17
have been central to discussions at Providence about “Christ centred
education.” They allow us to believe with confidence that faith and
higher learning are not opposed. In fact, both are made possible and
accessible because of Christ, who as the Logos is the ontological
ground of all knowledge, and because of the Spirit, who enlightens
human hearts and minds, inviting and drawing all to pursue the Way,
the Truth, and the Life. So we need not fear learning and knowledge,
even when these challenge our preconceptions, received traditions,
and present understanding.
Of course, we can and should be appropriately cautious, critical,
and inquisitive about new ideas, especially when they have not yet
gained consensus affirmation amongst those that study and test them
most closely and skillfully. Yet, because all truth points ultimately to
the One who IS the Truth, we can be open and confident that pursuing knowledge is a legitimate good, even more – a divine calling to
use well the minds that God has given us. Christians teaching and
serving in higher education often find that their scholarly work leads
them into deeper worship of and reverence for God. Sometimes what
they discover through scholarship disrupts and troubles them; this
too can faithfully reflect biblical faith, occasioning lament, intercessory prayer, or words of exhortation and even confrontation for the
church.
What does it mean to be a Christian scholar and teacher? How
should Christian scholars pursue “Christ centred education”? What
challenges do Christians scholars uniquely face as they “seek first
the kingdom of God and his righteousness/justice” in the world of
higher education? How do they balance faithfulness to Scripture
viii | Didaskalia
and their received ecclesial traditions with a commitment to engage
their scholarly fields with excellence and full integrity? What unique
opportunities do Christian scholars have to bear witness to Christ and
to influence the direction of our culture?
This volume of Didaskalia is devoted to these questions. The vision for the issue was to gather Christians who teach and do research
in the world of higher education—across diverse academic disciplines, representing different types of institutions, and serving in various capacities—and invite them to reflect on the meaning of “Christ
centred education” from the perspective of their own contexts, fields
of study, and/or roles and responsibilities. The collection of essays
that follows captures that vision nicely. Though it is not intended to
be comprehensive, saying all that can be said about Christ centred
education, it does provide a representative sampling of insightful perspectives and experiences. Contributors to the volume include specialists in education, theologians, biblical scholars, ethicists, philosophers, university administrators, a physician and research scientist,
two PhD students, and a Canada Research Chair holding two PhDs
(in comparative literature and philosophy) and publishing widely on
a variety of scholarly subjects.
We begin with the feature article, written by Jens Zimmermann,
which provides a helpful overarching framework for the entire volume. Zimmerman seeks to demonstrate the enduring significance of
the Christian humanist tradition for the integrity and health of higher
education. If Christian education is to adequately address the challenges of the present, it must reclaim its roots and re-appropriate the
collected wisdom of its past.
Next, Nadia Delicata explores Christ centred education as it
developed in the early church (particularly Origen) and culminated in
the medieval period. David Johnson then contributes “A President’s
Perspective” on Christ centred education, exploring the opportunities and challenges that administrators of Christian universities face
today.
Two theological contributions follow, a concise “Theology
of Confessional Teaching” by David Gurezski and a theological
proposal for relating faith practice to academic practice by Amanda
MacInnis-Hackney. After this, Stephen Kenyon and Mark S. Mc-
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Leod-Harrison reflect philosophically on the potential for analytic
thought in philosophy and theology to contribute to the formation of
Christian wisdom.
The next two articles address the relationship between science and Christian faith. The first, by Brent Rempel, examines the
writings of Benjamin B. Warfield (1851-1921), as an example of a
Christian biblical scholar who thought deeply about Scripture and its
interpretation in light of modern scientific developments of his day,
particularly evolutionary theory. The second article makes a unique
contribution to this volume; in it, Joshua Swamidass narrates his
own personal journey as a scientist and a Christian, sharing both his
struggles and growth experiences on the way to cultivating “proper
confidence” in Jesus. He helps us to ponder the beauty of Jesus and
the reality of his Resurrection, neither of which science can prove or
disprove—yet both of which can be transformative for scientists as
persons loved by God.
The final two articles specifically address the practice of education from a Christian perspective. Elfrieda Lepp-Kaethler writes
about the importance of hospitality for an effective and holistic
learning environment. Drawing on the work of Christine Pohl, Henri
Nouwen, and Waldemar Janzen, she connects hospitality in education
with God’s own hospitality as divine Host. In the concluding article
of the issue, Ken Badley and Kris Molitor discuss “Talking Straight
in Education: Letting our Yes Mean Yes.” They alert us to the ways
in which educational ideals tend to become slogans, with both positive and negative results for teaching and learning. They encourage
Christian educators to use educational language carefully and to be
sure that their actual practices align with their stated intentions.
Taken together, this collection of essays offers much food for
thought to provoke the imagination, stimulate critical thought, and
encourage ongoing conversation about what it means to practice
teaching and scholarship “in” Christ. It is my hope that readers catch
a glimpse of the passion these writers have both for Christ and for
their scholarly fields, as well as attain a deeper appreciation for the
importance of their work for the church and for society.
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Christian Humanism | 1
Christian Humanism:
Christ-Centred Education
by Another Name
Jens Zimmermann*
Abstract
Christian humanism is the best descriptor for Christ-centred higher
education; that, at least, is the argument advanced in this article based on historical grounds. The first section defines Christian humanism based on biblical
and patristic theology. The second section shows how this theology continued to
inform the major cultural periods of medieval and Renaissance humanism. In
the final section, the concept of Christian humanism is brought to bear on the
contemporary crisis of higher education in order to argue that Christian universities could be in a unique place to address the current situation, but they
must do so by means of a creative reappropriation of the Christian humanist
tradition.
Introduction
‘Humanism’ is probably not the first term many Christians
would chose to describe Christ-centred education. In fact, the very
idea of admitting ‘humanism’ into educational theory will likely
appear to most evangelical Christians as blasphemy in the biblical
sense of the word: does not humanism pretend to godhood by replacing our dependence on God with human autonomy, thus representing
the very opposite of Christ-centred education? Indeed, it would, if we
meant ‘secular humanism.’ Yet secular humanism is neither the first
Jens Zimmermann is Canada Research Chair of Interpretation, Religion, and
Culture at Trinity Western University, and current visiting research fellow at Trinity
Hall, Cambridge University. He has published widely on hermeneutic philosophy,
theology, and literary theory. His recent publications include Incarnational Humanism (InterVarsity Press, 2012), Humanism and Religion (Oxford University Press,
2012), Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2015)
and Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism: Education and the Restoration of Humanity (Oxford University Press, 2016).
*
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humanism nor the most authentic one. My contention in this article
is that Christian humanism is indeed an appropriate, perhaps even
the best, label for Christ-centred higher education. Why? Because
on account of the incarnation, Christianity essentially is humanism.
One can argue on solid biblical and theological grounds that Christianity is all about the formation of full humanity. To anticipate our
fuller account of the theological justification below: in Christ, God
became human in order to establish true (or complete) humanity, and,
through our union with Christ, provide a way for all who embrace
His renewing gift of grace to become transformed into Christlike
beings, that is, into perfect humanity. This humanistic interpretation
of Christianity was dominant in the early church and was known
as an educational process, or paideia, with the goal of deification.
For nearly a thousand years or more, Christians pursued paideia, or
education, as Christ-formation. If this transformation into Christ’s
likeness is indeed the purpose of human life, then Christian education in general, including post-secondary education, must somehow
reflect and be directed towards this goal.
There are many arenas for Christian education: families, churches, schools, seminaries, and universities are the most obvious, but,
according to Luther at least, learning our civic responsibilities in politics, trade, and other professions are also means of Christian character formation. Our focus, however, will be on Christian humanism
and post-secondary education in part because that is the area of my
own professional experience, but also because the much publicized
crisis of higher education is emblematic for the general loss of a
unifying vision in Western cultures concerning the ultimate goal of
human existence. Some such telos is required to endow education
with purpose and to direct educational institutions and politics. Given
the still pervasive view among Christians and non-Christians that the
default definition of humanism is atheism (or secular humanism), I
will first explain the theological tradition of Christian humanism predominant in the early Church and then discuss the idea of Christian
higher education and the Christian university in light of this tradition. I will conclude with some central, current issues that Christian
institutions of higher education would benefit from approaching with
a Christian humanist perspective.
Christian Humanism | 3
1. What is Christian Humanism?
The defining features of Christian humanism were established
as Christians began to unfold the full meaning of the incarnation,
the astounding mystery that God revealed himself most fully to us
in the god-humanity of Jesus. Indeed, one of the striking differences
between patristic and current evangelical theology is the former’s
emphasis on the incarnation. The church fathers seem not to get
over the marvel that God demonstrated His love for human beings,
his philanthropy (Tit. 3:4), by becoming human flesh in order to
“refashion humanity as it was in the beginning,” restoring true life
to human beings so that “the power of the resurrection might come
upon the whole human race.”1 The church father Irenaeus famously
spoke of humanity’s “recapitulation” in Christ. In Christ, humanity
was collectively taken up and perfected into the originally intended
final form.2 Participating in true life through our union with Christ,
our entire human nature, soul and body, becomes transformed by the
power of God into a new human being.3 For Irenaeus, whose teaching is representative of the early tradition, the Christian life is our
transformation into homus verus (true human being),4 homo vivens
(living human being),5 or novus homo (new human being).6 In short,
1 Cyril, Saint, of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, trans. John Anthony McGuckin, ed. John Behr Crestwood, Popular Patristics (New York: St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, 1995), 115.
2 See, for example, Irenaeus: “Sed quoniam unus et idem est qui ab initio plasmavit nos et in fine Filium suum misit, praeceptum eius perfecit Dominus, ‘factus
est ex muliere’ et destruens adversasium nostrum et perficiens hominem secundum
imaginem et similtudinem dei.” Irenaeus, of Lyon. Adversus Haereses V. Greek or
Latin text with German translation; Fontes Christiani, ed. Norbert Brox, Wilhelm
Geerlings, Gisbet Greshake, Rainer Ilgner and Rudolph Schieffer, 5 vols. vol. 5
(Freiburg; New York: Herder, 1993), 21.2, p. 165.
3 Clearly, for Irenaeus, “salvation” (salutis) encompasses the whole human being,
soul and body. The church tradition holds to “the same salvation for the whole human being (salute totius hominis), that means of soul and body (hoc est animae and
corporis).” Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, Book V, 157.
4 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, V, 24.
5 Cyril of Alexandria also uses this term, “the revitalization of human bodies which
is achieved by participation in [Christ’s] holy flesh and blood.” Cyril, On the Unity
of Christ, 58.
6 Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, 270.
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for the early Christian tradition, the good news and the whole point
of being a Christian was that through participating in the life of God,
we become fully human by being refashioned in the image of Christ.7
The result of this teaching was that for roughly the first six hundred years of early Christian theology, salvation was defined as deification (or theosis). Early theologians, from Ignatius of Antioch to
Justin Martyr, from the great Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria to
the influential Cappadocian fathers, and extending from Athanasius
all the way to Jerome, Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers, and Aquinas,
declared that God became a human being so that human beings could
become deified. Evangelical Christians often misunderstand deification as the Promethean aspiration to godhood. Within Eastern Orthodox theology, another helpful term for deification is “Christification,”
the putting on of Christ. Deification, in short, defines the goal of the
Christian life as becoming godlike by being shaped into Christ-likeness. So when Athanasius wrote in his treatise on the incarnation
that “God was made human so that we could become gods,” he did
not mean in any way that our human essence changes into a divine
nature.8 For the church fathers, deification refers to becoming like
God not in nature but in character.9 Here is, for an example, how the
church father Basil defines god-likeness:
7 For example, in Cyril of Alexandria, for whom God “came in the likeness of those
who were in danger, so that in him first of all the human race might be refashioned
to what it was in the beginning. In him all things became new.” Cyril, On the Unity
of Christ, 88.
8 We find warnings against this mistake in many patristic writers, including Basil,
Nyssa, Naziansus, and Augustine. To take just one example, Irenaeus recognizes in
seeking equality with God the false promise of the snake in Genesis 3:5; for Irenaeus, partaking of the divine nature makes us sons of God in the sense of adoption:
“After all, for this reason did the Word of God become human and the son of God
the son of man so that the human being can become the son of God by sharing in the
Word of God and being adopted as son” (uti filiorum adoptionem). Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, Book III, 247.
9 This emphasis on Christ-like character is indebted to the patristic distinction
between image (referring to body, dignity, freedom, and capacity for communion
possessed by all as created in God’s image) and likeness (referring to Christ-like
qualities as described by Basil that were lost in the fall). Emphasizing character
should not make us overlook that deification includes the body and its transformation into the “incorruptible” matter of the new creation as evidenced by Christ’s
post-resurrection body.
Christian Humanism | 5
if you become a hater of evil, free of rancor, not remembering yesterday’s enmity; if you become brother-loving
and compassionate, you are like God. If you forgive your
enemy from your heart, you are like God. If as God is
toward you, the sinner, you become the same toward the
brother who has wronged you, by your good will from
your heart toward your neighbor, you are like God. 10
Given Basil’s explanation of deification, we should translate this
formula for human transformation, while preserving its essential
teaching, into language more familiar to modern Christians ears:
“God became human so that by being transformed into Christ-likeness, human beings can attain their true humanity.”
I suspect that not a few readers whose thinking has been shaped
by the likes of John Piper, R. C. Sproul, and John McArthur, worry
that we are here opening the door to theological liberalism or perhaps
works-oriented Catholicism. Is not Christianity, after all, about God’s
holiness, righteousness, and glory? Certainly it is, but how is God
glorified? According to Jesus’ prayer in John’s gospel, we glorify
God by being like Him:
May they all be one, just as, Father, you are in me and
I am in you, so that they also may be in us, so that the
world may believe it was you who sent me. I have given
them the glory you gave to me, that they may be one as
we are one. With me in them and you in me, may they be
so perfected in unity that the world will recognize that it
was you who sent me and that you have loved them as
you have loved me.11
The biblical text indicates that Christians should become like God
by participating in Christ. Through communion with God we are
to reflect the glory of God’s own trinitarian love, to become like
10 Basil, Saint, the Great, On the Human Condition, trans. Nonna Verna Harrison
(Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005), 44.
11 Jn. 17:21-23 (New Jerusalem Bible).
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Him so that the world may see God. The apostle Paul expressed
this transformation in terms of God’s image and new creation. For
Paul, Christianity was about “being molded to the image (eikonos)
of his son that he may become the eldest of many brothers” (Rom.
8:29). The final goal of the Christian life is our transformation to
“the image or likeness (eikona) of the heavenly one” (1 Cor. 15:49).
This “heavenly one” in whom “all things were made new” (2 Cor.
5:17) created in himself a “new human being” beyond any racial,
national, or even gender divisions, and Paul urges Christians to “put
on this new human being” (kainos anthropos; Eph. 4:24). For Paul,
salvation is transformation into Christlikeness, that is, our metamorphosis into the image of God glorifies God by reflecting his glory.
Paul concludes that “all of us, with our unveiled faces like mirrors
reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the image
that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory; this is the working of
the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). Thus it would seem that for
Paul, along with many theologians in the early church, Christians did
not have to choose between the glory of God and a proper interest in
what it means to be human. Seeking the one would naturally entail
the other, since the incarnation of God in Christ was an act of philanthropy by which God perfected humanity and invited his creation to
share in this perfection through communion with himself. Salvation
is nothing less than becoming fully Christlike. The church father
Irenaeus summarized the early church’s understanding of salvation in
his famous phrase “the glory of God is a human being fully alive and
human beings live by the vision of God.”12
In short, Christianity is the archetypal humanism because the
central mystery of our faith, the incarnation, purposed the divinization of our humanity. The whole point of being a Christian is becoming fully human by becoming refashioned in the image of Christ. As
Emil Brunner explains,
Behind Christian humanism stands, as its basic
foundation, the faith in that Man in whom both the
mystery of God and the secret of man have been
12 “Gloria enim vivens homo; vita autem hominis visio Dei.” Irenaeus, Adversus
Haereses, 4, 34, 5-7.
Christian Humanism | 7
revealed in one; the belief that the Creator of the
Universe attaches Himself to man; that He, in whose
creative word the whole structure of the universe has
its foundation, has made known as His world purpose
the restoration and perfection of His image in man; that
therefore not only the history of humanity but the history
of the whole Cosmos shall be consummated in Godhumanity.13
Our supernatural destiny has always been, as the church father Gregory of Nyssa liked to put it, “friendship with God,” the kind of intimate filial relation Jesus had with the Father that is characterized by
love of God, love of neighbour, and even love of enemies, because
our basic relation to reality is no longer one of fear but one of love.
The Trappist monk and Christian humanist Thomas Merton
pointed out that without this starting point from love, what you get
is secularists, atheists, fundamentalists, and religious legalists. The
common mistake of these diverse groups is to assume that God
begrudges us acceptance and freedom. For example, the secularist
opposes Christianity to human autonomy and freedom, while the religious legalist seeks to earn God’s favour through obedience. Fundamentalism is another manifestation of deeply rooted fear, namely the
fear of impurity, of messiness, complexity, and interpretive ambiguity: all must be regulated, controlled, and clear-cut. Consequently,
these manifestations of fear as philosophy seek to steal the heavenly
fire in some way, not seeing that God is eager to give freedom and
abundant life as a gift, that in Christ He wants to bestow his very self
on us. As Merton rightly concludes, “the center of Christian humanism is the idea that God is love, not infinite power.”14
With love as the centre of an intelligible universe, Christian
humanism developed two distinct features, the one epistemic, the
other ethical. First, conscious of living once again in union with the
creator of the cosmos, Christian humanists have traditionally es13 Emil Brunner, Christianity and Civilization. First Part: Foundations, Gifford
Lectures (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1948), 89.
14 “Christian Humanism,” in Merton, Thomas, Love and Living, 135-51 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 149.
8 | Didaskalia
poused the unity of faith and reason and, therefore, acknowledged
truth from all sources. The kind of enmity between knowledge and
faith that characterizes our modern culture wars between science and
religion, for example, is foreign to Christian humanism. This cosmic
dimension of the incarnation profoundly shaped the church fathers’
understanding of reality. Their perception of reality was essentially
Christ-centred: the creative word of God, through and for whom all
things were made and are sustained, had become human to reconcile
the world to God. That existing things derived from and somehow
participated in the divine was a common metaphysical assumption
in the ancient world. We need only think of ancient Stoic philosophy
with its idea of a universal rationality (Logos) that pervaded the universe and to which the human reason and moral life should conform.
Early Christian theologians familiar with philosophical currents of
their day recognized in such insights premonitions of God’s revelation in Christ, even while recognizing the decisive differences with
their own faith. With God’s eternal Logos becoming human, the
unified centre of reality was now revealed in the person of Jesus as
God’s love for mankind, so that whatever was true and noble in the
world became subservient to attaining the true humanity God had
accomplished in Christ.
The incarnation thus embedded an important truth in early
church theology: God’s self-revelation is mediated through the material world and social realities, therefore, faith, reason, culture, and
learning from others go together. As Athanasius points out, in Jesus,
God became “himself an object for the senses,” with the result that
“all things have been filled with the knowledge of God.”15 This view
laid the foundations for the Christian ideal of education as character
formation. What the Greeks had called paideia, and what the Romans had adopted as humanistic studies or the liberal arts for the
elite, was transformed by Christians into a liberal arts tradition centred on the Bible. In this tradition, all learning was taken into account
and put to use for the acquisition of wisdom. Knowledge, however,
was not merely taken from books but from life itself. Following the
15 Athanasius, On the Incarnation: Greek Original and English Translation [in
English & Greek.], trans. John Behr (Yonkers, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press,
2011), 15.
Christian Humanism | 9
crucified savior, the Christian curriculum of paideia included suffering and self-denial as means for shaping our true humanity.
The second distinct feature of Christian humanism is ethical. Its
christological foundation endows Christian humanism with a strong
ethics of human solidarity. Aware of sharing the reconciliation of
humanity to God and therefore to one another, Christian humanists
have traditionally recognized the image of God in every human being, extending charity to all on account of their connection to Christ.
The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer restated in modern
language what earlier Christians had relentlessly preached, to help
the poor and to demand social justice for the outcasts of their time.
Bonhoeffer affirms the general solidarity with all human beings that
we regain through Christ’s work: “in the becoming human of Christ
the entire humanity regains the dignity of being made in the image
of God. Whoever from now on attacks the least of the people attacks
Christ, who took on human form and who in himself has restored the
image of God for all who bear a human countenance.”16 Bonhoeffer
sounds just like Irenaeus, or Basil, or Augustine when he links Christian ethics to our participation in the life of God through Christ:
Inasmuch as we participate in Christ, the incarnate one,
we also have a part in all of humanity, which is borne by
him. Since we know ourselves to be accepted and borne
within the humanity of Jesus, our new humanity now
also consists in bearing the troubles and the sins of all
others. The incarnate one transforms his disciples into
brothers and sisters of all human beings.17
For early Christians, the Eucharist was the central reminder of this
philanthropic bond with humanity. In partaking of bread and wine,
the Christian is nourished by the reality of the new creation, and thus
drawn into unity with God, becoming one. Yet this communion was
never sealed off from the rest of humanity. In Eucharistic homilies
16 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, eds. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey,
vol. 4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2001), 285.
17 Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 285.
10 | Didaskalia
of the early church, participants were always reminded that their
“being-in-Christ,” implies the “being-with” and “being-for” others.18
Christianity thus introduced into ancient humanism a social, humanitarian aspect that differed from the earlier pagan emphasis on heroic,
individual excellence.19
Let me try to sum up what one might best call the “incarnational
humanism,” of the early Christian tradition. The goal of the Christian life is becoming truly human by participation in Christ. True
humanity is deification or Christification, the transformation into our
full humanity that is characterized by unity and charity. How is this
transformation accomplished? Through a synergy of asceticism (a
term best translated as self-discipline) and divine grace. Many early
Christians distinguished between the image and the likeness of God,
believing that the former is every human being’s natural endowment
of reason, freedom, and capacity for relationality, while the likeness
of God is regained through the development of Christian virtues
with the aid of the Holy Spirit. This is why Basil can write, “what is
Christianity? Likeness to God as far as is possible for human nature.”20
2. Christian Humanism and Educational Ideals
The incarnational, Christian humanism established by the early
church has deeply shaped Western ideals of human dignity, of what
18 J. M. R. Tillard, Flesh of the Church, Flesh of Christ: At the Source of the
Ecclesiology of Communion, trans. Madeleine Beaumont (Minnesota: The Liturgical
Press, 2001), 1-3 and 133 ff.
19 Irving Babbitt reminds us that “ancient humanism is as a whole intensely aristocratic in temper… It is naturally disdainful of the humble and lowly who have not
been indoctrinated and disciplined.” Yet Babbitt’s warning not to confuse humanism
with the “promiscuous philanthropy” of humanitarianism fails to appreciate the
radical change of this attitude in Christian humanism. The incarnation ensures that
humanism is inseparable from humanitarianism. See Irving Babbit, Literature and
the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities (Chicago: Regnery,
1956), 4-7.
20 Basil, On the Human Condition, ed. John Behr, Popular Patristic Series (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005), 45. Compare this to Plato’s statement of godlikeness as human destiny: homoiosis theoi kata to dunaton as the goal
for philosophy quoted in George H. Van Kooten, Paul’s Anthropology in Context
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 126.
Christian Humanism | 11
constitutes a good or healthy society, and above all ideals of education. Augustine’s vision of Christian education as formation of
Christ-likeness is captured in his influential work De Doctrina Christiana, a program that decisively shaped the medieval curriculum. A
recent English translation renders the work’s title aptly as Teaching
Christianity, because the book is basically a guide for educators of
the Christian faith on how to interpret scripture and communicate its
truths. His own classical training in literature and rhetoric, along with
his view that all valid reasoning is guided by the light of God’s truth,
prompted him to assert the usefulness of pagan and non-biblical
sources for Christian education. Augustine’s endorsement of secular
wisdom reflects the earlier Christian consensus, Tertullian notwithstanding, that so-called pagan literature was an essential preparatory
ground for understanding the scriptures.21 Christian education was
to make use of truth wherever it was found, albeit in service to a
Bible-centred curriculum.
Early Christians found the Greco-Roman heritage of the liberal
arts congenial to Christian education because of the Greek emphasis on learning as character formation. Werner Jaeger, in his classic treatment of the linkage between Greco-Roman and Christian
education, explains that “as the Greek paideia consisted of the entire
corpus of Greek literature, so the Christian paideia is the Bible. Literature is paideia insofar as it contains the highest norms of human life,
which in it have taken on their lasting and most impressive form.”22
Through a sustained Christian effort, the pagan Greek paideia,
and its Latin equivalent, the studia humanitatis, became Christian
humanism. The best of Greek education had aimed at developing
a most complete human being. Plato, for example, believed that
assimilation to the divine was the goal of philosophical inquiry. Early
Christians adopted this basic educational aspiration but filled it with
the biblical goal of becoming Christ-like. Christian education meant
21 See Basil, Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature; online:
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/basil_litterature01.htm (Date accessed Dec. 15,
2016).
22 Werner Wilhelm Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 92.
12 | Didaskalia
that Christ must take shape in the learner. This Christian takeover
of ancient liberal arts education was deliberate and driven by the
conviction that the Greek ambition to produce a highly cultured and
complete human being had been completed, even superseded, in
the humanity of God in Christ. At the same time, however, the truth
about humanity that God had providentially revealed in non-Christian literature remained valid and therefore a crucial propaedeutic for
Christian education.23
As the one true philosophy, that is, as the one true way of life,
the goal of Christian education was formation in Christlikeness, the
“becoming fit for the fellowship of Angels,” as Augustine liked to put
it.24 Following Augustine’s lead, the first universities that emerged
from cathedral schools were dedicated to a Christianized version of
liberal arts education. Even when Aristotle’s writings became the
most important philosophical and scientific source in the medieval
curriculum (itself an astonishing fact that controverts the popular
view that dogmatic conviction automatically prohibits learning),
university education remained focused on assimilating the wisdom
of ancient culture guided by the ideal of “ordering all wisdom and
knowledge to the study of theology.”25
Indeed, when we understand the inspiration behind medieval
universities, we will not hesitate to call the much maligned scholastics ‘Christian humanists,’ who continued in the patristic belief
that education contributes to the restoration of the divine image. For
example, we know that medieval scholastics were consummate synthesizers and compilers of authoritative texts. Why did they do this?
They believed that by this method they could repair the fragmentation of knowledge occasioned by Adam’s fall from communion with
God. According to the medievalist R. W. Southern, scholastics aimed
at “restoring to fallen mankind, as far as was possible, that perfect
system of knowledge which had been in possession or within the
23 Jaeger, Early Christianity, 61.
24 Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans (London: Penguin,
1984), 14.
25 Timothy B. Noone, “Scholasticism,” in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, eds. Jorge J. E. Gracia and Timoth B. Noone, 55-65 (Oxford: Blackwell,
2002), 60.
Christian Humanism | 13
reach of mankind at the moment of creation.”26 They did not believe
that everything knowable could be known, but that “at least all reasonably obedient and well-disposed members of Christendom would
have access to a body of knowledge sufficient for achieving order in
this world and blessedness in the world to come.”27 Once again, the
incarnation was central to the Christian humanism of the scholastics.
The concept of the incarnation wove nature, humanity, reason, and
religion into a meaningful tapestry accessible to human beings because they are made in God’s image. Medieval humanism thus draws
its scholarly energy from the same motivation as patristic humanism:
assured of God’s love, the intelligibility of creation and the trustworthiness of reason, scholastic humanists energetically pursued their
‘repair job’ of restoring the fullness of knowledge to humankind.
The complexity of reality and their lack of experimental knowledge
doomed the scholastic project to failure. Yet we should not forget
that medieval Christian humanists gave us universities and that their
trust in reason laid the foundations for modern science. Moreover,
medieval theological debates prepared the ground for modern human
rights by encoding in conceptual, legal language the patristic notion
that freedom and personhood make up the dignity of human beings
as made in God’s image, wherefore human dignity issues in certain
human rights.28
Christian humanism also shaped the Renaissance, our next
major formative cultural period in Europe. We have to resist the view
that Renaissance humanism is secularism waiting to come out of the
closet. Few doubt that Renaissance humanists were Christians, but
many evangelicals, Reformed worldview enthusiasts, and secularists
show a rare agreement in the opinion that most humanists were more
interested in paganism than in Christianity, and that their whole project was a Promethean attempt to enthrone man in the place of God.29
26 R.W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, Volume 1:
Foundations (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1995), 5.
27 Southern, Scholastic Humanism, 5-6.
28 Theo Kobusch, Die Entdeckung der Person (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1997), 36.
29 For a corrective, see Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism: Education and the
Restoration of Humanity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), especially N.
14 | Didaskalia
It is true, of course, that Renaissance humanists emphasized the
individual more than medieval theologians, and that they developed
a stronger historical consciousness than preceding Christian cultures. Yet, on the whole, we have to consider Renaissance humanism
as a Christian movement in continuation with the earlier Christian
humanisms.30
Consider, for instance, that Renaissance humanists brought
about a patristic revival, retrieving not only Aristotle and Plato, but
also, and with great religious earnestness, patristic sources, such as
Augustine (in the case of Petrarch) or Origen, Irenaeus, and Jerome
(in the case of Erasmus). Consider also that the apparently blasphemous language of extolling the greatness and god-like stature of
humanity will appear less radical when we understand it as a continuation of the patristic language of deification. When Pico della
Mirandola (1463-94) goes on about the greatness of man and urges
the subordination of our baser instincts to reason so that we may
live to up to our divine image, he is really not that far away from
Augustine’s similar educational program. Pico celebrates humanity’s
God-given dignity, not secularist human autonomy. Pico may not
have been your average church-going evangelical, but he is not, as
is usually assumed, the Renaissance villain to Christians or hero to
secularists, proclaiming the secularist sovereign self. The historical
theologian Henri de Lubac hits nearer the mark when he claims that
Pico’s Renaissance manifesto, Discourse on the Dignity of Man,
is not theologically opposed to traditional Christianity.31 Like the
church fathers and the medieval humanists, Renaissance thinkers
regarded the ability and drive of man to cultivate and shape his world
Wolterstorff’s chapter on Calvin’s Christian humanism.
30 Christopher Dawson is therefore correct to claim that “From the time of Petrarch
to that of Milton, the Christian humanists represent the main tradition of Western
culture, and their influence still dominated education and literature and art. The
secularization of Western culture dates not from the Renaissance or the Reformation
but from the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.” Christopher Dawson, The
Crisis of Western Culture (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America
Press, 2010), 32.
31 Henri de Lubac, Theology in History (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1996), 43.
Christian Humanism | 15
as “an emulation of divinity, since it was in this respect that man was
created in the image and likeness of God.”32
As did patristic and scholastic Christian humanists, Renaissance
humanists sought to harness and transform the best of human culture
in light of the incarnation. Renaissance humanists knew well that the
incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus set Christianity apart
from previous philosophies and religions. As Petrarch put it, only
Christianity truly joins heaven and earth. For however close Platonic thought may have come to Christian truth, that the divine Word
“became flesh, [and] how, joined to the earth, it dwelt in us, this the
learned Plato did not know.”33 The Christian teaching of the Word
become flesh allowed Renaissance humanists to adopt and infuse
with deeper meaning the love of literature inherited from the Greco-Roman liberal arts curriculum. It is well known that Renaissance
humanists were infatuated by philology, literature, rhetoric, and
poetry. What few people realize, however, is that their love for the
written and spoken word was consciously based on the incarnation of
the eternal Word of God.
The humanist Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), for example,
drew two important insights from christology. The first concerned
the creative power of words. Pontano held that since being exists by
the power of God’s Word, human beings, as those made in his image,
participate in this appearing of being through the word. Thus art,
poetry, and literature are not merely reflections of reality but actually
help us imagine and thus in some sense create our reality. Secondly, Pontano believed that the incarnation demanded that, just as the
eternal Word could truly show itself in time, so human universal
truths can be adequately depicted in language, but never exhaustively
so. The incarnation, in short, teaches that truth is interpretive and,
like God, cannot ever be nailed down to a final meaning. But there is
more: since human language shares in the divine Logos, Renaissance
humanists believed that language possessed an infinite possibility of
meaning. For them, Christian Word theology made language what
32 Charles Edward Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity
in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1995), 1:xx-xxi.
33 Petrarch, De otio religioso, quoted in Trinkaus, In Our Image, 2:658.
16 | Didaskalia
Heidegger would later call “a clearing of being,” that is, language
allows us to see things in new constellations and discover new meanings.34
Renaissance humanism bequeathed to Western culture a deep
love of learning, poetry, and literature for transformative education into Christlikeness.35 Christian humanists’ ultimate goal was
Christian character formation, and its view of the arts is neatly
summarized in the adage of Erasmus, prince of Christian humanists:
“reading shapes moral character” (lectio transit in mores). Renaissance humanists believed that education shaped character in terms
of knowledge and practical experience, both derived from the study
of literature (which included scientific texts, though we must keep
in mind that science then was less empirical than a philosophy of
nature). Renaissance humanists would be astonished at the marginal role the humanities play in the modern university, for who could
possibly question “the importance of the study of Philosophy, and of
Letters […]? Literature is our guide to the true meaning of the past,
to the right estimate of the present, to a sound forecast of the future.”36 Liberal arts education, in other words, immerses the student
in tradition, in the best human insights on perennial human questions
that are handed down to us, so that we can appropriate them for
assessing the present and shaping the future.
34 Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” in Basic Writings: From Being
and Time (1927) and to the Task of Thinking (1964) (New York: Harper & Row,
1992), 113.
35 No doubt, some Renaissance humanists were more inclined to a nominal, general
Christianity (calling it ‘religion’) than confessional, orthodox faith. The humanist
Paolo Vergerio (1370-1444), for example, defined the liberal arts as “those [studies]
through which virtue and wisdom are either practiced or sought and by which the
body or mind is disposed towards all the best things . . . Just as profit and pleasure
are laid down as ends for illiberal intellects, so virtue and glory, which for the wise
man are the principle rewards of virtue.” More orthodox humanists consciously replaced the pagan attainment of glory with the Christian end of displaying the virtues
and humility of Christ. Paolo Vergerio, “The Character and Studies Befitting a FreeBorn Youth,” in Humanist Educational Treatises, ed. Craig Kallendorf (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 29.
36 Aeneas Sylvius, “Concerning True Wisdom” (“De Liberorum Educatione”), in
Vittorino Da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, ed. William Harrison, 134-58
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 141.
Christian Humanism | 17
The same Christian humanism was still alive in the 17th century,
when the Catholic university professor and Christian humanist Giambattista Vico told his students that the goal of learning was to mirror
God’s philanthropy: “We must learn, O youth of great hope, in order
to know how best to be able to relate humanely to others.”37 After
all, Vico concluded, “What goal is more honourable than to wish to
help the greatest number of men and in so doing become more like
Almighty God, whose very nature is to help all?”38 Thus the legacy
of Renaissance humanism to Western culture is that self-knowledge
through studying the past and the schooling of our imagination
through literature, poetry, and the arts must follow God’s own love
for humanity. Education must be subservient to the common good
of society. For Renaissance humanists, higher education was for the
elite, but there was no ivory tower; rather higher education was to
produce a scholar citizen whose store of knowledge would allow
him (indeed, mostly him) to make wise political choices in civic
life. Higher education was meant to bear fruit in the actions of civic
leaders. For this reason, the second, practical element of humanistic
education consisted of learning classical languages, their grammar
and rhetoric in order both to recognize truth and to express it most
eloquently. This emphasis makes proper sense only when accompanied by a belief in a rationally and aesthetically ordered universe, in
which truth and beauty are inseparable. On the basis of such a reality,
the Christian humanist Giambattista Vico believed in the essential
power of metaphor and of images for the discovery of truths inaccessible to the deductive method of the rising Cartesian philosophy in
his day. To be sure, Vico knew that studying other languages, memorizing vocabulary, and sweating over translations inculcates a high
degree of self-discipline and opens the mind to different perspectives
embodied in languages. Yet there is a greater goal in the study of
linguistic excellence and eloquence.
If indeed truth is allied with beauty, and beauty inspires love,
then a good civic leader ought to know how to incite love for truth in
peoples’ hearts, in order to engage their willing participation. Most
37 Giambattista Vico, On Humanistic Education: Six Inaugural Orations, 16991707 (Ithaca [N.Y.]: Cornell University Press, 1993), 88.
38 Vico, On Humanistic Education, 101.
18 | Didaskalia
of human truth, Vico believed, is not a matter of evidentiary logic,
but of persuasion. Unless the speaker can appeal to the listener’s
imagination and thus incite his love for a truth and his willing assent,
he will remain “powerless to convince.”39 Writing in the early 18th
century, Vico already realized the importance of natural science, and
sided with Francis Bacon on the importance of inductive reasoning based on empirical evidence in the sciences. Yet already here,
Vico anticipates a modern trend, warning that “we pay an excessive
amount of attention to the natural sciences and not enough to ethics.”40 The problem of this mistake is not only that politics begins to
be driven by pragmatic concerns, but, the greater danger is that we
fall into instrumental reasoning, making decisions without questioning the humane end towards which they ought to be directed.
From whence can a critical, creative spirit arise against ossifying
bureaucratic systems and calcified, inhuman ideologies if not from
“The Freedom bestowed by the authority of wisdom”?41 The kind
of independent thinking that ensues from immersion in the best of
tradition, both Christian and non-Christian, however, has never been
popular with those who love conformity and the tyranny disguised
as efficiency by the iron cages of administrative systems. Yet, as Renaissance educators knew well, true humanity lies neither in seeking
security in certain scientific knowledge nor legalistic self-rule, but in
the pursuit of truth for the sake of wisdom and virtue. It is truth that
“brings man and God together,” because God is truth whose light
permeates the universe.42 Yet, to return to the main goal of Christian
humanistic education, for Vico, knowledge directed towards wisdom
is in itself insufficient unless it issues in virtue. For “it is by virtue
alone that God renders us like unto himself.”43
The Christian idea that education serves our transformation
into Christlikeness or true humanity, and the implicit hope of some
Christians that human society itself would become more like God’s
39 Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 38.
40 Vico, On the Study Methods, 33.
41 Giambattista Vico, On Humanistic Education, 69.
42 Vico, On Humanistic Education, 67
43 Vico, On Humanistic Education, 68.
Christian Humanism | 19
kingdom through this transformation, has become so deeply embedded in Western consciousness that even secularized educational theories bear the stamp of this hope. Not least important for this influence
was the patristic notion that God the divine educator had prepared
mankind through pagan teachings, and through his education of
Israel, for the true humanity shown in Christ. In addition, the Christian tradition also imparted to Western consciousness the notion that
humanity is not discovered but achieved, wherefore a humane culture
or society is also fragile, requiring constant preservation, adaptation,
and innovation. We see this heritage living on in the German philosopher-theologian J. G. Herder, who regards education as central to
human progress intended by divine providence but also dependent
on human effort. Becoming human, for Herder, is a God-given desire
but equally a responsibility: “Everywhere we thus find humanity in
possession and use of the right to form themselves into some kind of
humanity. . . God did not tie their hands in anything except through
their own disposition, time, and place.”44 Herder believed that by
means of human freedom and providentially guided organic development, God works out in humanity his own true image through
historical progress.
The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, though more
rationalist than Herder, nonetheless also held that education is
essential to becoming human. According to Kant, “Man can only
become man by education. He is merely what education makes of
him.” Through discipline and increase in knowledge, “it may be that
education will be constantly improved, and that each succeeding
generation will advance one step towards perfection mankind; for
with education is involved the great secret of the perfection of human
nature.”45 Kant also retains the humanist insistence on knowing
tradition: “Education is an art which can only be perfected through
the practice of many generations. Each generation, provided with
the knowledge of the foregoing one, is able more and more to bring
44 J. G. Herder, “Ideen zur Philosophie der Menschengeschichte,” in Johann
Gottfried Herder: Werke in Zwei Bänden (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1982, Band
2), 232.
45 Immanuel Kant, On Education, Dover Books on Western Philosophy (Mineola
N.Y.: Dover, 2003), 10.
20 | Didaskalia
about an education which shall develop man’s natural gifts . . . and
thus advance the whole human race towards its destiny.”46 We find
similar statements in Schleiermacher and Humboldt, the 19th century
founders of the modern research university in Berlin. They still insist
that all levels of education require tradition because “in order to
construct, in a higher sense, the future based on the present, one has
first to construct the present from the past.” Moreover, sound political direction in public affairs requires that “one possesses a proper
idea of the good and the true as such.”47 Until recently, even secular
thinkers never disputed that the liberal arts tradition, or ‘liberal learning,’ involves students in the conversation with the best thinkers on
envisioning a good society. Michael Oakeshott, an able defender of
liberal learning, summarizes well a secular understanding of higher
education:
Education […] is the transaction between the generations in which newcomers on the scene are initiated into
the world which they are to inhabit. This is a world of
understandings, imaginings, meanings, moral and religious beliefs, relationships, practices—states of mind in
which the human condition is to be discerned as recognitions of and responses to the ordeal of consciousness.
These states of mind can be entered into only by being
themselves understood, and they can be understood only
by learning to do so. To be initiated into this world is
learning to become human; and to move within it freely
is being human, which is a ‘historic,’ and not ‘natural,’
condition.48
46 Kant, On Education, 11.
47 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Texte Zur Pädagogik: Kommentierte Studienausgabe.
Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, ed. Michael Winkler and Jens Brachmann
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 2:349.
48 Michael Oakeshott and Timothy Fuller, The Voice of Liberal Learning (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 103.
Christian Humanism | 21
This insistence on a clear vision of education’s end has largely disappeared from higher education in our day, leading to crises in a number of areas that affect both Christian and non-Christian universities.
3. Christian Universities and the Contemporary Crisis of Higher
Education
Christian universities often worry about the ‘dying of the light,’
that is, they are governed by fear of secularization and the loss of
their Christian identity. While that may be a valid concern, there are
other, perhaps more important challenges that Christian scholars
face together with their secular colleagues. The most urgent problem
is the double loss of telos and logos, that is, of education’s overall
end goal and of a unifying rationale that encourages the integration
of knowledge disciplines in the service of this ultimate goal. In the
ancient world, the unity of knowledge and the purpose of education
were grounded in the belief that humans were essentially spiritual beings whose reasoning participated in rational-moral reality to which
truth and behaviour ought to conform. As strange as this sounds to us
moderns, “in this ancient vision, man gains his reality solely through
repetition of and participation in a divine reality.”49 Even while
holding to different visions of the “divine,” Pythagoreans, Platonists,
Roman Stoics, Jews, and Christians all held to a cosmos in which all
things somehow hang together. What set Christian education apart
was the radical claim that all things hang together in Christ whose
redemption of creation entailed his return, thus introducing the idea
of linear and moral progress into Western culture. The whole enterprise of the liberal arts, from its pagan origins to its Christian transformation that founded the universities, depended on this connection
between mind and world well into the 19th century. Without some
such connection, without all things somehow ‘hanging together’ in
a meaningful way, the true purpose of the humanities as the vehicle
for guarding and creatively appropriating the past for the present to
shape our future is lost.
The gradual breaking apart of the onto-theological synthesis
that linked mind and world through participation in a rational-moral
49 George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1995), 19.
22 | Didaskalia
cosmos resulted in the compartmentalization of reality into nature
(to be observed by scientists) and morality on the one hand, and
into aesthetics or other subjective values pursued by art, philosophy,
and religion on the other. The rupture between mind and world also
initiated the age of epistemology, with philosophers like Descartes,
Hume, Kant, and Locke wondering how our mind could correspond
to the world.50 Moreover, as Vico had feared, in the ensuing anxiety
for certain, indubitable knowledge, the mechanistic and mathematical world pictures won out. To this day, even while science has long
since abandoned these simplistic pictures of reality, the notion that
real truth must be quantifiable and measurable continues to exert a
strong influence, not least on university administrators obsessed with
‘metrics’ supposedly needed to demonstrate managerial efficiency.
Christian administrators would do well to recall that it was trust in
such simplistic world pictures that caused our current educational
crisis. Instrumental reasoning encouraged secularization, which first
dethroned theology as the ‘queen of the sciences’ and also resulted
in demoting theology’s successor, philosophy, as the meta-physical
discipline that could integrate various fields into a meaningful whole.
The German philosopher Edmund Husserl claimed, in 1936, that the
modern reduction of knowledge to empirically verifiable facts, and
the exclusion of the human subject from the process of knowing,
have rendered the sciences irrelevant to the perennial human question of meaning and purpose that drive all our cultural activity.51
The main problem with this development is not the ongoing
inferiority complex of the humanities. It may well be true that many
humanities teachers “do not have a buoyant, collective sense of the
distinctiveness and worth of what they do,” because “they lack today,
as they have for the better part of the past half-century, the relaxed
and easygoing confidence in the value of their work that scientists of
all sorts have.”52 What really matters, however, is that by cutting out
50 Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature
and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 3.
51 Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis Der Europäischen Wissenschaften Und Die
Transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Elisabeth Ströker (Hamburg: Meiner, 1996),
4-5.
52 Anthony T. Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities
Christian Humanism | 23
the subjective, human dimension of knowledge, as Husserl argued,
scientific positivism has “decapitated” critical thinking and deprived
us of the metaphysical questions that transcend the world of facts
towards matters of universal, lasting importance in an ever changing world.53 As a result, the centre of university education shifted
imperceptibly but, as far as one can see, enduringly, from questions
concerning the meaning of life to pragmatism and materialism. Especially the latter, usually in the form of scientific naturalism, increasingly shows an interest in claiming the abandoned “throne” of the
metaphysical disciplines, by reducing spirit, consciousness, or mind
to the material brain and thus integrating every component of human
life into a bio-chemical framework. John Sommerville, in his astute
account of the contemporary university crisis, aptly summarizes our
main problem: university programs teach how to make money and
how to contribute to the economy or produce the next technological
innovation, but they no longer concern themselves with how or on
what we are to spend money.54
How is a Christian university, a Christ-centred university, to
respond and flourish under the present cultural conditions? The
only realistic hope lies in recapturing the incarnational vision of
Christian humanism. The guiding image of this vision is that human
beings are made in God’s image, which is most perfectly shown in
Christ, God’s Word through whom all was created and all is being
redeemed. If God is Lord over creation, who created and continues
to create a comprehensive and richly diverse reality, then we should
expect humans made in his image to reflect this creativity, diversity,
and universality in some way.55 Christian universities must recover
and articulate intelligently for themselves and non-Christians the idea
that in Christ all knowledge disciplines are unified, wherefore the
Have Given up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007),
206-7.
53 Husserl, Die Krisis Der Europäischen Wissenschaften, 8.
54 John Sommerville, The Decline of the Secular University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 8.
55 Bernhard Welte, Gesammelte Schriften I: Grundfragen Des Menschseins (Breisgau: Herder, 2009), 119.
24 | Didaskalia
pursuit of knowledge is its own reward but also ought to serve the
common good of society.
Evangelical Christian institutions in particular too often channel
their praiseworthy love for Christ into narrow, dualistic theologies
that prevent them from addressing the real wounds of our current
culture, wounds that fester in the midst of Christian institutions too.
Christian universities, because they are Christ-centred, must move
beyond their narrow denominational and confessional tunnel vision to share God’s vision for a new humanity. Christian humanists
believed that Christ became human, died, and rose again, so that
we could attain our true humanity. Christ-centredness thus remains
inseparable from a concern for human existence. If God is most
glorified by human beings truly alive in psychosomatic fullness,
transformed body and transformed mind, through trinitarian communion, then Christ-centred education must promote research in pursuit
of this vision and critique dehumanizing cultural trends, religious
or not. Moreover, since in Christ all of humanity was summed up,
Christian universities must speak to humanity as a whole. Christ-centred education cannot mean withdrawal from the world into a sectarian bubble of illusionary separation from culture. This approach
invites automatic failure, since inevitably the worst of cultural trends
flourish undetected within such supposedly pure spheres of distinct
Christian thinking. Withdrawal from the world into Christian jargon
and an ossified particular Christian culture is not only impossible,
it is also unbiblical, if indeed Christ died for the life of the world.
Christian universities should avoid at all costs adopting a defensive
stance as their basic ethos, defining themselves negatively against
the rest of humanity. Instead, Christian scholars and administrators
should think, speak, and act out of their conscious sharing in the
reality of God’s accomplished new humanity in Christ.
How then does Christ-centred, higher education fulfill its
mandate of promoting full humanity? There is no easy way of doing
this, not least because the equation for true humanity is somewhat
indefinite at both ends. On the one end, the full biblical picture of
humanity continues to unfold as research, secular and Christian, adds
to human self-understanding. On the other end, the very scientific,
technological advances that enhance both our self-knowledge and
Christian Humanism | 25
quality of life may turn out to threaten human worth and identity. For
example, bio-genetic and reproduction technologies have changed
dramatically our perception of humanity.
Unfolding a Christ-centred, humanistic vision in a modern university must be an interdisciplinary endeavor with the humanities as
the crucial hub around which collaboration with the natural sciences
and professional programs takes place. For as soon as physicists,
economists, biologists, chemists and social scientists start thinking
about the implications of their findings for the nature of reality and
society, their musings begin to operate with philosophical and theological assumptions. This is inevitable, for despite the much lamented fragmentation and specialization of knowledge disciplines, we
find at work in every research area the inherent desire of the human
mind for the integration of knowledge into a meaningful whole.
This meaningful whole is not a predetermined totality, but
consists in a field of questions and probable answers defined by one’s
respective cultural pressure points concerning our identity and purpose as human beings. For example, the Western Christian university
could emphasize three research foci responding to three crucial areas
in which our humanity is currently threatened: theological anthropology, epistemology, and technology.
A Christian theological anthropology would seek to unfold what
it means to be made in God’s image in light of the incarnation. An
ecumenical and historical approach to this topic would take us much
beyond the cliché of the imago Dei as merely our rational capacity
and help us retrieve a richer tradition that extends our god-likeness
to stewardship of creation, freedom, self-transcendence, relationality,
sociality, charity, and the importance of the body. The greatest enemy
of Christian anthropology based on the imago Dei is not secularism
but naturalism, or secularism insofar as it assumes naturalism with
its reduction of mind, spirit, or consciousness to the material brain.56
Issues of sexuality, gender, human dignity, and rights should also
be discussed within this anthropological framework and viewed in
light of Christ’s humanity and its eschatological promise of taking
us beyond gender to an intimacy with God and one another beyond
56 See Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and
Naturalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
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our wildest dreams. In pursuing these questions, Christian scholars
from all disciplines need to interact with theologians to maintain the
crucial balance of the Pauline “as if” structure of living in the world
and affirming enduring creational dynamics while recognizing their
potential transformation in the eschaton.
Another important area for determining our humanity is epistemology. Who we are and how we know things is obviously closely connected. Christian scholars ought to recognize and promote
a fundamentally hermeneutic theory of knowledge. For Christian
humanism, at least, human access to truth follows the pattern of the
incarnation. Space does not permit the delineation of an incarnational hermeneutic for the disciplines, so the following pointers must
suffice: scientist and sociologist of knowledge Michael Polanyi has
convincingly demonstrated the personal nature of knowledge as rooted in a basic interpretive movement of understanding common to all
intelligent forms of life.57 According to Polanyi, all insight and discovery come about through the personal indwelling of an inherited
framework of meaning from which we probe into, discover, and articulate unknown phenomena. Knowledge thus comes about through
an expanding movement that integrates details into an interpretive
framework. Polanyi thus debunked once and for all the myth that
scientists operate without tacit assumptions or reliance on tradition.
In a sense, even the scientist believes in order to know. A similar
hermeneutic spiral has been suggested by philosophical hermeneutics
in the tradition of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. Their work,
taken up by many others, has opened up a way of recovering the
participatory sense of the ancient world. We may no longer have a
cosmology that connects world and mind through a world soul and
Platonic forms, but hermeneutic thinkers insist that mind and world
are linked through a certain disclosive way of being in the world
that is expressed in linguistic traditions. Charles Taylor has recently affirmed the constitutive role of language for human perception,
arguing that scientific positivism and its penchant for mathematical
57 See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). For an abbreviated version of his
argument see Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New York: Doubleday, 1967).
Christian Humanism | 27
verification provides an inadequate account of our human perception
of the world.58
The upshot of these conceptual developments is the demise of
the truth model of scientific objectivism, which works for a limited
application in the experimental sciences, but is wholly inadequate for
most other aspects of human reality. Understanding the fundamental
interpretive nature of truth dissolves the hackneyed opposition of
reason and belief. We all reason on the basis of assumptions that we
do not—because we cannot—question in the process of acquiring
knowledge. The interpretive nature of human knowing also spells the
end of any fundamentalism whether it be secular or religious. Christians should have no problem with this idea, least of all as regards
divine revelation. Knowledge of God, too, follows the incarnational
pattern. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s memorable phrase, “Just as the
reality of God has entered the reality of the world in Christ, what is
Christian cannot be had otherwise than in what is worldly, the ‘supernatural’ only in the natural, the holy only in the profane, the revelational only in the rational.”59 This is not to say that non-scientific
truth claims lack evidence, but that their evidence is more complex.
The kind of existential truths that really matter to human beings,
society, and its institutions require a kind of evidence Paul Ricoeur
called “attestation,” based on a convincing narrative tapestry, backed
up by personal credibility that makes the most sense of all details at
hand.
Finally, if these anthropological and epistemological considerations reflect truly human being and knowing, then Christ-centred education should engage critically any dehumanizing cultural
trends—not just in the name of Christianity, as a sectarian enterprise, but in the name of the full humanity God promised in Christ.
Technology and technological enhancement of communication and
other human abilities currently changes most profoundly the way we
interact with one another and with the world. Christians should be at
58 See Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human
Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2016).
59 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005), 59.
28 | Didaskalia
the forefront of analyzing these changes and their effect on how we
define human nature.
Conclusion
I have tried to argue the case that Christ-centred (higher) education should be a Christian humanism because education should
be grounded in the central Christian mystery of the incarnation.
God became human in Christ to restore us to the full humanity for
which we were originally created. Christianity is essentially about
our restoration to God’s true image. This divine gift includes the
pursuit of knowledge for the common good and thus also entails the
Christian’s essential solidarity with all of humanity. All are made
in God’s image, and all have to accomplish their humanity. Even if
Christians do so in conscious reliance on God’s grace, they still share
with all human beings the educational task of becoming human.
As the philosopher Jacque Maritain once put it, “the chief task of
education is above all to shape man, or to guide the evolving dynamism through which man forms himself as man.”60 Our cultural
climate has changed in important respects since Maritain wrote this
sentence in 1949. Yet the basic task of becoming human remains the
same, centred around the focal areas of anthropology, epistemology,
and technology. How we engage social justice issues, political or
economic problems will depend on how we respond to these three
areas of inquiry. Moreover, Christian humanist scholarship requires
a recognition of the humanities’ central importance for preserving
and creatively appropriating for our time the greatest insights and
questions that constitute the horizon of understanding from which
we proceed to respond to current issues. In other words, tradition is
crucial for our continual working out what it means to be human. The
transmission and conscious indwelling of our collective human experience as sedimented in science, literature, and the arts are essential
for our intellectual and moral judgments on current problems. In the
modern university, however, the humanities must collaborate with
and learn from the other disciplines, in working out concrete answers
60 Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1943), 1.
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to concrete questions arising for each generation based on technological and scientific advancement.
If the term ‘Christ-centred education’ is not to become another sectarian Christian label it must be based on an incarnational,
Christian humanism. Christian universities must resist the current
trends in higher education towards vocational training to the diminishment of liberal arts education. They must oppose with clear vision
Christian reiterations of educational job factories covered with a
veneer of Christian phrases and clichés. Instead, Christian scholars
must respond to the real dehumanizing cultural pressure points of our
time, and they must be motivated to do so out of the very depth of
biblical tradition and dogma. If Christ died so that humanity may be
renewed, Christ-centred universities should be at the heart of cultural
activity and renewal. Precisely because of their Christ-centred mission, they should be seen to work for the public good.